by Dan Simmons
Blackness for minutes or seconds. Then I open my eyes expecting to see the Lady, but instead see snatches of greying sky through a film of red. Wiping blood from my eyes, I sit up. Some great heifer of a man with a red face—Sergeant McKay from B Company—is helping me up, pulling me out from under a dead weight which seems to cling to me. I see sprawling white hands, blood-soaked khaki, and for an instant I think that the Sergeant is pulling my soul from my shattered body as if he were God’s midwife.
“Just bloody bad luck for him,” the red-faced NCO is saying. “Are ye all right though, Sir? I think it be just a scratch on yer noggin, Sir.”
I shake my head and try to focus on what the Sergeant is saying. Men are rushing by, climbing ladders. I have been unconscious for mere seconds, if at all.
“…another go, Sir?” McKay is saying, half holding me upright as we shuffle toward the ladder through the throng of frightened men. “Careful, Sir,” he says, pulling me to one side, “best not to step on the gentleman’s face.”
I look down. Almost under my boot lies Captain Brown. The machine-gun bullets have stitched a bloody row from his groin to his forehead, shattering his teeth and Adam’s apple along their route. I realize numbly that it is the brim of Captain Brown’s helmet that had caught me between the eyes seconds before; the weight of his near-eviscerated body driven into mine that had tumbled me back into the trench.
“Upsy-daisy, Sir,” says the Sergeant, speaking to me in a tone one would use with a child as he helps me up the ladder.
No, I scream in my mind, there is some mistake. I have already climbed up there. No one should have to do it twice.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I say, my voice shaky. I wipe blood from my eyes again.
Incredibly, the Sergeant finds my cane where it had fallen near the wire and hands it to me. Bullets whine past our ears. The barrage is now some hundreds of yards ahead, but enemy 5.9s are falling all around us. I see my company—Company C—some mere 20 yards ahead, advancing with rifles at port arms, heads lowered as if advancing into a strong rain. Company B, McKay’s chaps, are rising out of the trenches now two platoons abreast every 200 yards, a man every two yards, all of their pacing straight from the Infantry Manual.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I say again, dusting myself off although the khaki is soaked more with mud and water than dust. I take a step, wobble, steady myself with my cane, and start toward the enemy lines.
No Man’s Land is as repugnant as I remember it. Some shell holes still smoke and stink of cordite, while others resemble ancient lunar craters with their stagnant ponds and scum of poison gas. Bodies and bits of bodies lie everywhere here between the wire. The filthy litter is everywhere; I notice a clean, well-oiled rifle lying untended and consider sweeping it up before I notice the clutched hand and severed forearm still attached.
I turn to shout to Sergeant McKay but a series of explosions hides him and the rest of his platoon from sight. Ahead of me, C Company have taken shelter in a slight dip in the terrain and are lying in almost perfect battle order. Beyond them, D Company continue on toward enemy wire. I stagger the thirty paces or so to the muddy fold in the ground and collapse next to a Lance Corporal who is keeping his head down. A machine gun stitches its way across the soil inches from my head. For the first time I notice that I have lost my helmet in the tumble back into the trench.
After a few moments of sheer gratitude at being alive, I see that while our barrage continues to move forward toward the enemy lines, the German counterbarrage is now churning up the debris between the muddy depression in which we lie, and our own wire. And it is moving closer. Not wanting to appear the insufferable officer-wallah, but also not wanting C Company either to die where they have taken shelter or to fall too far behind D Company’s attack, I stand up amidst the bee-hum of bullets and pace back and forth on the far side of the depression, urging the chaps to their feet with gestures of my cane since no one can hear my voice.
None of the men move a muscle. I admit that I feel a momentary surge of uncharacteristic anger at this general funk, but it passes when I realize that if I hadn’t earned these damned subaltern pips due to my college and social standing, I would be lying there with the other chaps hoping that the goddamned lieutenant would either shut up or lie down or get shot.
I drop down into the low ravine next to the Lance Corporal and begin pulling him to his feet, hoping that our example will shame the other men into movement. The Corporal almost comes apart in my arms.
He is dead, of course. They are all dead, lying there in their proper battle lines, faces against the stocks of their rifles, arms thrown across their faces as if frozen in the act of flinching. I check two other men—a private named Dunham and a bantam-sized little pipefitter named Bennett—and see from the wounds that shrapnel has dropped them like leaves from a tree. It may have been our own barrage, or perhaps the first lucky counterstrokes of the German counterfire, but a hailstorm of shrapnel has cut these men down in their tracks.
Limping, using the cane now for support rather than inspiration, I hobble forward ahead of the enemy barrage.
Just before reaching the enemy wire, I drop into a smoking shell hole where Sergeant Ackroyd is arguing with Raddy—my bunkmate, young Lieutenant Raddison. Their voices are inaudible but I can see the spittle flying from the open mouths in their white faces. It takes me a moment to understand the source of their disagreement, but then I comprehend. Both men have had their guts opened as if by a butcher’s knife and they kneel there in the bile-colored mud, their intestines spilled out in a common, smoking heap. Each man is attempting to tuck himself back in, as if they were schoolboys embarrassed at having been caught with their shirts outside their trousers, and each is arguing with failing strength about which strand of grey-white gut belongs to whom.
The argument ends as I watch with wide eyes; first Raddy quits shouting and heels slowly to his left, eyes showing only whites, finally tumbling into his own viscera, and then Sergeant Ackroyd leans forward with almost ballet-like grace, the scooping movement of his arms and hands slowing, slowing, until all motion halts like the last, tired movements of a worn machine. I begin pawing my way backwards, up and over the crater lip, back into the cleanliness of the machine-gun fire, but not before I see Sergeant Ackroyd stir, his bloodless face turning toward me, his bloodless lips forming words I mercifully cannot hear.
A pitiful remnant of D Company has breached the enemy wire and seized a fifty-yard section of forward trench. Twice more I am knocked down by shellfire, once blown into the wire, which is painful, but eventually I extricate myself and drop down the muddy parapet into German trenches for the second time in my life.
A beefy sergeant and a wire-thin private whirl toward me and crouch as if ready to bayonet me.
“At ease, men,” I manage. My voice sounds alien to me and I cannot imagine they can hear any of it. Both the enemy and friendly barrages have joined now into a maelstrom of metal and flame falling along this mile of trench line.
But the Sergeant lowers the Private’s Lee Enfield, averts his own bayonet, and leans close. “Good Christ Almighty, Sir. You’re wounded bad. Lie down, Sir.”
For a moment I am sure that he is right and that I am dying, perhaps already dead, but then I glance down at myself and have to rub muddy knuckles against my lips to keep from laughing or sobbing. The front of my tunic is absolutely soaked with Captain Brown’s blood. My shoulders are caked with drying brain matter. And blood continues to flow from the deep scratch on my forehead from where the captain’s helmet struck me. My face is caked with dried blood. I realize that I must look like a combination of a Red Indian and a demon from hell to these exhausted and shell-shocked men. Realizing that there is no time for irony, I lean forward and say, “Situation please, Sergeant.”
The old NCO sags upward almost to attention. I read his lips more than hear his voice. Even above the cordite and trench stink, I can smell the rum on his breath. “We’ve secured this bit o’ trench, Sir,” h
e reports. “Me an’ about ten o’ the lads from Lieutenant Hall’s platoon. Jerry keeps counterattackin’, Sir, but e’ don’t do much but throw them stick bombs what’re easy to throw back, Sir.”
As if to demonstrate this piece of acumen, a German grenade on its throwing stick comes sizzling and bouncing into the trench not three yards from us. The wire-thin private calmly sets down his rifle, lifts the bomb, and tosses it back over the sandbagged revetment. The explosion follows in less than a second.
“They’re set for a bloody eight seconds, Sir,” reports the Sergeant with disdain in his voice. “Fritz don’t like to hold ’em for no more than two seconds or so. Oodles of time, Sir.”
I nod and glance around. This is not Orchard Trench. We are some distance from our objective, perhaps as much as a hundred yards. We have captured some form of forward observation trench from the looks of the hastily sandbagged emplacement, but because it is connected to Jerry’s main line, he obviously wants it back. As if to demonstrate the veracity of my assumption, there is shouting around the corner and the surviving half-dozen men of D Company fall back to this small section of trench, firing and throwing Mills bombs as they go. I press against the parados as stick grenades bounce in and are thrown back. Enemy 5.9s explode in No Man’s Land a few yards behind us; “friendly” 18-pounders throw up soil and bits of corpses a dozen yards to our front. The Sergeant and I bury our faces in the muddy sandbags and wait for the clods and shrapnel to settle.
When I lift my face, it is to shout at the Sergeant. “Where is Lieutenant Hall?”
The rum fumes wash over me. “He went down way back there, Sir. Near where C Company is hidin’. Why the fuck don’t they come up to support us the way they was told to? Sir?”
I wave away his question. “We’ll hold this section of trench until relieved or ordered to fall back,” I shout. All five of the men are gathered around me now. Two have fallen just seconds ago when a stick grenade had a shorter fuse than the private and his chum had thought.
I look at their faces. They understand that my order is a death sentence. They show no anger. Two go off to the corner where the trench zigzags on our right and begin firing down it. Two others move to the corner on our left. The Sergeant begins pulling bandoliers off the dead private and the other man who has just been killed. “Ammunition won’t last ’til it gets dark,” he says.
I want to say something inspiring now—“We’ll hold” perhaps, or “It will last until A Company arrive”—but I merely nod and move along the trench, swinging my cane and throwing back the occasional stick bomb. Instead of letting up, the barrage increases in severity as both sides focus on this section of shallow trench. When I raise my head to look back, one of the two men guarding our left flank is writhing on the ground and holding the bloody mass that was his groin just seconds ago. His mate stares in horror. To our right, I hear shouts in German…German!…and the Lance Corporal at the corner there fires seven rounds in rapid succession. He seems to be praying, but as I come closer I can hear his dry-lipped litany—“I’d give me fockin’ left bollock for a fockin’ Lewis gun now… I’d give me fockin’ left bollock for a fockin’ Lewis gun now…” He squeezes off three more rounds and reloads.
I clap him on the shoulder and walk back toward the left flank, half expecting men in grey to come flying over the parados or around the corner and bayonet me before I reach the Sergeant. I am swinging my cane and whistling softly. I am very happy.
The marble bannister under my hand was cool. I was wearing only a silk robe that rustled softly against my skin. The wind continued to rise, shimmering the treetops in the darkness like a squall moving across brittle water.
“Come to bed,” she said softly from the room behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder at the wind-stirred bed curtains and the glimmering firelight. “In a moment,” I said, still wishing for a cigarette.
She did not wait. I heard the rustle of her long gown and she stood next to me against the railing. Starlight sketched the curve of her cheek and set soft highlights in her tumbled hair. Her eyes looked soft and moist. She set her hand on mine and I could feel the warmth of her hand above, alternating with the chill of the marble under my palm.
“It is not fair,” I said at last.
“What, my love?”
I did not turn to look at her. “It is not fair that you use the act of love to steal men from life.”
I thought that I could almost hear the mockery in her silence, but when I finally turned to look at her, there was no mockery in her downcast face. Her fingers trembled against the back of my hand. She asked, “How can one steal by giving?”
Pulling my hand away, I looked toward the dark woods. “Sophistry,” I mutter.
“What else can one expect from a…metaphor?” Her whisper was just audible above distant thunder.
I turned quickly and seized her by the throat. Her neck was so slim that it fitted nicely into my one hand. Applying pressure, I could feel her breath stop suddenly. Fragile structures lay just beneath the webbing between my straining thumb and forefinger. Her eyes widened inches from my own.
“Would you like to taste death?” I whispered in her face.
The Lady did not struggle although I could sense her weakening as no breath or blood flowed above my firm grip. Her hands stayed at her sides. I think that if she had raised one to scratch or strike me, I would have snapped her neck then like a spent match. Her gaze never left me.
“Can Death die?” I breathed into her small ear and then pulled back to watch her face. Starlight and lack of blood made it pale as porcelain. Her dark eyes seemed to answer my question with a question.
“Damn,” I cursed myself and dropped my hand away. She did not raise her small hands to her throat, but I could hear her labored breathing and see the red marks my fingers had left there. Beyond us, the wind died as suddenly as it had come up.
“Damn,” I said again and kissed her.
Her lips were moist and open and I could feel a sense of mutual surrender flowing through and from our contact. It was exhilarating, like the instant when one has launched oneself into space before gravity’s unsubtle intervention. Her fingers did rise then, finally, and migrated, hesitant and softly fluttering, to the back of my neck. Her body pressed against mine so that I could feel her thighs and the soft cusp of her belly against me through the thin layers of silk which were all that separated us.
Our kiss ended just as I grew dizzy. She pulled her head back as if also gasping for breath or equilibrium. I gave her time for neither.
Sweeping her up in my arms, her gown so low on her left breast that I could see the pale nipple above the laced border there, I carried her from the balcony into the bedroom.
The gas shells make a different sound from High Explosive, a sort of double cough, a bit like a crass tradesman loudly clearing his throat to be noticed.
“Gas!” screams the Sergeant and we scramble through our canvas kits for the masks. I pull mine on and fumble with the clumsy straps. The thing is awkward and imperfect, a thrown-together contraption of army shirt material, thick mica eyepieces, and a nosepiece tube holding sodium thiosulphate. It will not tighten properly and I frenziedly pull at straps to cinch the gaps. Someday they will invent a true gas mask, but in the meantime my life depends upon this absurdity.
The Sergeant and I peer around, attempting to see if the gas is visible. The Germans have been using copious quantities of tear gas recently, but it is a nuisance gas and one can spot the white clouds before they disperse. In the last year or so, there has been much more use of the killing gases chlorine and phosgene. In hospital, I had seen the results of German battlefield experiments with a mixture of ethylene in a solution of sodium chloride—the so-called mustard gas. In recent weeks they have loaded these various gases in shells rather than release them from canisters.
The effect, at least on the half dozen of us still alive in the forward trench, might be described as comic. The Sergeant and I are peering arou
nd like frightened frogs. The other four chaps have set down their rifles and have been digging through kit for their masks. If the Germans want the trench now, all they have to do is waltz in to take it.
I see no visible gas. Phosgene. Almost certainly phosgene.
Chlorine is bad enough—a thousand parts per million in the air means death. The gas destroys the small bronchial tubes and alveoli of the lungs so that one cannot absorb oxygen; a man then literally drowns in the water his own lungs create. Our Brigade buried a few victims of chlorine, and the skin of these men was invariably a bright blue, their stiffened arms were thrown wide with terror, and their staring eyes told all.
Phosgene is worse. Twenty times more lethal than chlorine, invisible, and much more difficult to detect. One can smell chlorine long before the dose is lethal, but phosgene, even in deadly amounts, smells only faintly of moldy hay. It does its job, though. When I was in hospital, one poor chap who had tried only a whiff of phosgene vomited four pints of a thick, yellow fluid from his lungs each hour for the forty-eight hours or so until he mercifully drowned in his own excretions.
I do not know much about this new mustard gas, but Captain Brown said that it blisters and burns the flesh, blinds the eyes, rots mucus membranes, seeks out and attacks the genitals, and scours right through to the bone. He said that our chaps who are developing it were delighted that the symptoms do no appear until hours after exposure. Soldiers will not know whether they are doomed or not. I remember the autopsy report I tried to set to verse. Evidently the Germans have perfected it before us. Fritz was always clever at chemistry.
The Sergeant is shouting something now, but even leaning so that my canvas mask touches his, I cannot understand him. But I look to where he is pointing.
